One Guys Technical Trials and Woes

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Tired of always having to enter your 200+ character password into terminal when you use SSH? Well there is an easier way to do it that requires no password and is still just as secure! Have this nice little tutorial on setting up SSH Public/Private keys so you don’t have to use a password each time you SSH into a system.

For the past month or so my storage box has been driving me insane. Whenever I SSH into the box, after about 30 seconds it would always disconnect me. I checked everything from routes, to firewall rules, and nothing was amiss. I spent weeks looking for the cause of these SSH Disconnects, but to no avail. That is, until recently. After some extreme googling, I was able to figure out the cause and I had to share it.Continue reading →

After searching the internet for a monitoring solution for my network, I can finally say I have found the best contender, and its worth sharing. Consider this a update/solution to my previous rant about monitoring software.

How does a painless, easy install sound? How about cross platform support? Would you like Graphing/Logging of network traffic and system resources? What if I said it was based on PHP/SNMP, and it is 100% free and open-source? Ladies and gents, let me introduce you to Observium!

This is technically a continuation of my post Here, but I felt this deserved its own post. If you are like me, and have Samba mounts that HAVE to be in place and ready right after boot, you want a way to make sure the drive is mounted before the system fully starts up. Well, I made a nice little script that will check a samba mount at boot time.

CoovaChilli is an open-source captive portal system for linux that I personally use to run a free wireless access system around my area. The reason I use coovachilli instead of, oh I don’t know, nocatspash, is that with CoovaChilli I can not only limit speed per each connection, but I am also able to log IP and MAC Address’s to prevent abuse. So, lets go install coovachilli.

So I recently invested in a new storage server and set it up as a NFS server so I could set up HA to prevent downtime with my VM’s when I had maintenance to do on my Proxmox Hosts. The problem is that if I use iSCSI it sends the drive as a block device that a single VM can use and the problem with NFS for me is that it was extremely slow (need to do more research on this) but when the server was setup with samba, I was able to get 113MB/s both ways to the box from my desktop (8x 300GB SATA drives in raid 10). So why not just use samba with proxmox?

I am tired of looking for a simple, functional server monitoring program. I have spent the last week or so trying to get a fully functional setup of Nagios, Cacti, Zabbix, or Icinga and almost all to no prevail. Why is there no EASY and SIMPLE monitoring program out there that is Open Source, customizable, AND functional?

So I finally decided to make the jump to virtualization. Sure the performance is 1-3% slower then running on raw hardware, but the features gained from this way outweigh the cons. Now I can do backups on the fly, snapshots, quickly move resources around machines, and its all free thanks to Proxmox! Proxmox is a Linux Debian based distro that utilizes a custom kernel with support for OpenVZ and KVM. I’l go more into depth on Proxmox later, but for now here is my situation.

Having trouble with getting FTP to work on a server with iptables? Is your server stalling out when trying to enter passv FTP mode? Well this here is the quick fix for that. Its one of those little things thats nice to keep documented.